Afronline – The Voice Of Africa

It’s a bit of a cliché to decry the demeaning depiction of women in music videos, but Loverance’s “Up!” featuring 50 Cent deserves a re-hashing of that old argument.

The anatomical description of exactly what the male persona is interested in reduces the female half of our planet into walking sex objects.

What the woman has, the man wants and “really, really “needs. The result of this heterosexual match-up? The woman’s moans and groans and a lot of visceral liquids.

Globally, the black female body undergoes similar real or figurative assault—from rape as an instrument of war in Darfur and the Congo, to dancehall lyrics from the Caribbean which deploy rhetoric similar to 50 Cent’s.

What I am most interested in, however, are those moments when patriarchal hegemony exposes fissures. No single form of domination has the potential to entirely overcome resistance. Colonial forces succumbed to indigenous political agitation during the 1950s and 1960s in Africa, just like women’s liberation movements began to retract male supremacy.

In similar ways, arguments constructed in the entertainment industry about male-female relations betray moments of dissonance. East Africa’s music videos periodically engage in regressive gender politics. Thankfully, however, it is easy to trace female agency and empowerment and immediately begin to counter notions of male dominance.

I would like to look at three tracks: ‘Binti Kiziwi’ by Zanto, ‘Sinzia’ by Nameless, and ‘Ĩno nĩ Mũmũ’ by Murimi wa Ka-Half. For all three songs, I will discuss both the lyrics and the accompanying videos; each representation by the respective artist does unique and complementary work in communicating its message.

Zanto’s record works hard to place the female body on a pedestal — an act that silences women rather than according them due agency.

‘Sinzia’ by Nameless demonstrates fissures in the fiction of male control; ultimately, however, the music video resorts to heterosexual configurations to maintain men’s assumed control over women.

Wa Ka-Half’s music is a wonderful contrast to Loverance’s Up! In the former, all references of violence are male-oriented; unlike Loverance and 50 Cent’s song though, the only thing getting “beat” in Wa Ka-Half’s song is the man.

Masculinity silencing women, attempted in Up!, is best exemplified by Zanto’s Binti Kiziwi [1]. The Tanzanian artiste sings about a deaf and dumb girl with whom he is in love, but is unable to communicate his emotions.

The singer can neither rely on language nor the girl’s friends to send his missives of love. The symbolism of a woman who, though pursued by men, cannot speak for herself is the ultimate fantasy for conservative patriarchy.

The woman cannot “talk back;” she neither fights back nor seeks to assert her presence. In the lyrics she is not heard, and in the music video she is seated for the entire length of the song. Although the camera follows the male singer and his retinue in various parts of an urban area — presumably Dar es Salaam — the woman sits on a tree trunk and waits.

However, the video is very astute in its discussion of the power of visual texts. The video, directed by Adam Juma, is a meta-commentary on visual studies and their effective ability to communicate across barriers. Having failed to secure his beloved’s attention, the male persona in the video — performed by Zanto — uses sketched drawings to pass on his message. In one scene he is shown working on pencil figures while seated in a commercial structure. Both the viewer and the woman whom Zanto is wooing get to see the drawings at the same time.

The sketches depict a man, who is dressed like Zanto, and a woman, dressed like his object of affection. They also depict a heart-shaped love symbol — eliciting a smile from the girl. Finally, they depict another representation of Zanto with tears spilling from his eyes as he gestures rejection with his hands. The whole package is complex and connects with viewers on different levels: the lyrics, the music video, and the drawings featured in the video.

For the most of the song, the woman is an object to whom Zanto directs his attention and emotions. It is not until she places her hand in Zanto’s open palm that she asserts her own subjectivity. She can now exercise her agency to make choice: accept him or reject him. The smiles on the couple at the end of the song demonstrate she chose to welcome him into her life.

Zanto, who has been kneeling in front of the girl while showing her the drawings, takes the arm she offers and kisses her on the back of her hand. These gestures are all part of the vocabulary that his viewers comprehend; he is aping a proposal as depicted by Hollywood and his kissing gesture suggests he regards her as some kind of royalty. Nevertheless, or perhaps precisely because she is placed on a pedestal of beauty, the woman has no voice, and her choices are only celebrated to the extent that they coincide with those of the man after her.

The commercial nature of this relationship is not explicitly alluded to in Zanto’s lyrics; however, the fact that it is staged at a curio shop forcibly brings a discussion of economic and monetary exchange to the fore. Curio traders sell “cultural” items to tourists seeking a physical souvenir to complement memories of their travels.

In modern day tourism, an individual has to return home with an object that supposedly captures the essence of her destination. Dragons might epitomize China, while lions, elephants, giraffes and buffaloes do the same for Africa. In Zanto’s music video we catch glimpses of necklaces, cowry shells, batik prints, wooden sculptures etc. stock generally found in such shops.

Despite Africa’s international acclaim as a tourist destination waiting to woo its visitors with safaris, pristine beaches, and snowy-capped mountains, the majority of tourism is foreign-oriented and domestic travel only makes a small percentage of earnings garnered. Thus, many of the clients to whom curio traders sell are foreigners, especially from Europe, Japan and North America.

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